Focus on your employee's strengths to capitalize on your diversity and inclusive workforce

· Talent acquisition,Personal Development,Strategy

It is important not to focus solely on gender and racial percentages in your diversity and inclusion strategy.

Instead, leverage the diversity of your current workforce through investing in your diverse employee's strengths. This will help your organization attract and retain higher quality diverse candidates quicker. As individuals and teams, it is easy to get bogged down in our shortcomings.

Unfortunately, spending time improving our weaknesses can be cumbersome with only small incremental rewards.

Developing your employees' strengths is a much better use of time and energy.

Consider this step by step process to improve your diversity and inclusion goals by focusing on the strengths of your workforce:

1. Encourage your diverse workforce to discover their strengths.

The first step is to find out each employee's strengths. This can be done with a psychologically based online strengths assessment from the comfort of their work computer. The employee should read through the results and discuss them with their leaders.

2. Engage your teams' skills.

As leaders review the individual and team assessment results with each direct report, they should think about which tasks plays into each person's strengths best. It is important that leaders adjust the work among their direct reports to make sure they are utilizing each person's strengths as much as possible.

3. Reap the rewards of employees at their peak performance.

As each individual on the team starts to work primarily on projects that tap into their natural strengths, the team will find a boost in productivity, morale and retention.

People enjoy working on projects where they excel and it is a springboard to even higher team productivity.

This will also inspire people to draw upon their own diverse backgrounds to innovate new products and procedures that can have a huge impact on the organization's results and profits.

4. Recruit and retain new diverse top talent.

As individuals and teams begin to work at their peak, they will naturally stay longer and refer other qualified top diverse talent to the organization. This is a nice added benefit to your organization's diversity recruiting and retention strategies.

One tool that can help your organization is the Strengthscope team profile. Make it a point to implement a diversity and inclusion strategies that attracts, hires and retains top diverse talent from across the globe by focusing on strengths.

We support global organizations holistically who want to achieve their goals of working internationally by hiring and developing global talents, leaders and multicultural teams. We offer not only customized, top-quality international talent acquisition strategy, global leadership, teams, cross-cultural and diversity consulting and training programs, but we also provide in-depth coaching from ICF-certified coaches and trainers who speak French, English, Dutch, Spanish and German. Take action and schedule a free strategy session with us today.

Magali Toussaint is the founder of U Diverse. She is a certified talent acquisition strategist, an ICF-certified leadership and career coach, cross-cultural trainer and job search strategist with an extensive career in recruitment, HR, diversity, and education. She has lived and worked in over four countries and speaks French, English and Dutch.